By Richard DuckettTelegram & Gazette StaffPosted Mar 31, 2016 at 6:00 AMUpdated Mar 31, 2016 at 1:08 PM​​Sean Stanco and Michael Carr have been commuting West recently.West, that is, from their respective homes in Everett and Somerville to Worcester for the 4th Wall Stage Company production of American playwright Sam Shepard’s dark comedy “True West,” which opens its run at The Sprinkler Factory at 8 p.m. March 31.

“I’ll travel anywhere to do (Sam) Shepard,” Stanco said.″ ‘True West’ is one of my favorites,” said Carr, even though the days and nights driving to and back from 4th Wall can be a challenge.

But the the two actors - who have numerous Boston credits - have been this way to Central Massachusetts before, appearing in two other productions of Sam Shepard plays with 4th Wall, “The Late Henry Moss” and “Simpatico” (both staged in Whitinsville). Stanco was also Stanley in 4th Wall’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Astrov in its “Uncle Vanya.”

4th Wall’s managing director Barbara Guertin directed Stanco and Carr in “Simpatico,” and the three are reunited again for “True West.”

“I like working with Barbara,” Stanco said during an interview before everyone would get down to work at a recent rehearsal. “I think we kind of have the same taste for certain plays - a dark side, but with humor.”

“We had such a great time with ‘Simpatico’ and they wanted to do another Shepard - they’re tailor-made for Shepard,” Guertin said of Stanco and Carr.

The two have won great reviews in previous productions. Paul Kolas, writing about “Simpatico” for the Telegram & Gazette, said of Stanco and Carr, “There’s raw energy in their volatile scenes together, right up to their last, electrifying encounter.”

In “True West,” which premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 1980, clean-cut and ambitious Austin is working on a screenplay while house sitting for his mother in Los Angeles. To Austin’s annoyance, his older, hard-drinking and destructive brother Lee shows up, looking none the better for spending “time in the desert.” Austin is afraid that Lee will mess up a meeting he’s arranged with a Hollywood producer, Saul. The fears prove well founded as Saul picks up a pitch for a screenplay by Lee, dumping Austin’s. Austin starts to hit the bottle and harbor destructive thoughts.

“Anything can turn on a dime, and that’s what happens,” Guertin said of the grim but funny twists and turns of “True West.”

Carr plays Austin and Stanco is Lee, with Derek Sylvester as Saul and Guertin playing the mother who will have a hard time recognizing the house she returns to.“I love the mix of tension and humor. It can by funny and somewhat terrifying and it has a slow burn,” Stanco said of the play.

“There’s definitely a mix of the realistic and almost absurd, but they make sense at the same time,” Carr said.

Austin has “contrasting feelings,” Carr said of his character. “I think I need to be in that sort of (clean-cut) life, but there’s that restless side.” When things start to fall apart, “Maybe this is my chance to try out the other side. I think we’re pretty much capable of anything if we’re in the right circumstances.”

Stanco said that Lee is “an opportunist, yeah. Almost like a kind of parasite. I think he’s kind of jealous of the life that Austin has. A typical opportunist, that’s what I think of him. And somewhat unstable. A man on the edge of life and sanity. And a bit of drinking problem.”

The screenplay pitching and Hollywood fickleness, while highly satirized in “True West,” is something that Guertin, Stanco and Carr can recognize.“It’s just as true today as when it was written. And I think all of us (Guertin, Stanco and Carr) dabble a bit in film as well,” Guertin said.

“It feels very true,” said Stanco. “I like that comedic element that rings true with the producer. Everyone in Los Angeles is a screenwriter. Everyone has a story - it’s not that far from the truth.”Stanco had a recurring part in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.” He grew up on the North Shore and is tall but down to earth. He has a day job. “UPS, that’s like the real job. I do as much theater as I can. I’m attracted to these kind of plays (‘True West’) and film stuff when it comes up.”

Carr is similarly straightforward. He said he was an engineer. “I was laid off a month ago.” Originally from the Midwest and Arizona, he came to Massachusetts 13 years and stayed. “I like Boston,” he said. With theater and film, “I try to do it when I can.” He has a role in the short film “Snowflake” that is being shot mostly in Worcester.

Guertin is involved with that production as well. She has been active in Worcester since first coming here from New York City to act in a Worcester Foothills Theatre Company production. She became a member of the former theater’s board of directors.

At 4th Wall, Guertin said, one of the goals is to present productions “you won’t get to see normally around here.” Upcoming is “Becoming Dr. Ruth.”“True West” will be 4th Wall’s second production at The Sprinkler Factory (the first, in October, was “Turn of the Screw”), and Guertin likes the ambiance with an adjacent art gallery. “It’s a wider collaboration of artistic experiences.”

Meanwhile, 4th Wall has just reached an agreement with Actors’ Equity Association, the professional theater actors’ union, on an Equity Guest artist contract.“It basically signifies that we’re a professional theater company. We have to run by professional rules,” Guertin said. “True West” will be first official professional production, although, “in general, I’ve been running the theater company this way anyway,” she said.​It’s the sort of thing that also helps draw actors such as Stanco and Carr West to 4th Wall.Contact Richard Duckett at Richard.Duckett@Telegram.comFollow him on Twitter @TGRDuckett

‘True West’ Four starsWORCESTER - Actors Sean Stanco and Michael Carr are very familiar with the works of Sam Shepard, having acted in 4th Wall Stage Company’s productions of “The Late Henry Moss” and “Simpatico.” Add to their estimable resume their utterly galvanizing performances in Shepard’s “True West,” which dazzled an all too sparse audience at Worcester’s trendy Sprinkler Factory Thursday night.

Carr plays Austin, a Hollywood screenwriter at work on his latest screenplay, a “romance” that has caught the favorable attention of a movie producer, Saul Simmer (Derek Sylvester). He’s house sitting for his mother (Barbara Guertin) in her Southern California home, while she’s on vacation in Alaska.

His older brother, Lee (Stanco) is a drunk and a thief, who after spending a few months in the desert making money off a fighting pit bull, has shown up unexpectedly to pay Austin a visit after years of sibling estrangement. The contrast between the brothers is embellished with edgy humor and the threat of physical violence. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cringe at the dark humor that gallops maliciously throughout “True West,” but it’s an ambiguity that Stanco and Carr address with mesmerizing portraiture.

Austin is the “by the book” brother, an ambitious Ivy Leaguer, with a wife and children in Northern California, who has carved out a comfortable life for himself. Lee is Austin’s antithesis, an obstreperous, volatile, opportunistic bottom feeder who upends Austin’s tidy world with a vengeance. Stanco brings him to hilarious and harrowing life, an unpredictable parasite who usurps Austin’s idea of a screenplay with one of his own, a “modern Western,” highlighted by a cuckolded man pursuing his wife’s lover.

It’s subversively ironic to see the tables turned, when Lee dictates the chase scene to Austin – “the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s chased doesn’t know where he’s going.” It’s a perfect summation of “True West.” One has no idea where it’s going, but the ride – with chirping crickets and howling coyotes playing their intermittent music in the background - is wildly memorable.

Initially, Austin is the straight man to Lee’s comic relief. Thanks to the effortless chemistry between Stanco and Carr, their relationship is a riveting mix of affability and tension. Lee keeps interrupting Austin’s flow of thought as he sits at the typewriter trying to concentrate on his screenplay, like the dominant schoolyard bully toying with the meek and mild class nerd.

But Austin’s strained patience with Lee, which Carr delineates with a terrific blend of sly tactfulness and mildly smug sarcasm, comes to a head when Lee wins a bet with Saul at the golf course and cons his way into a movie deal. That is when “True West” transposes its sibling scenario in unexpected ways. The desert-dwelling thief becomes the screenwriter, the screenwriter becomes the desert-seeking thief.

Chastising Lee for stealing a neighbor’s TV at the beginning of the play, Austin steals several toasters at the beginning of the second act. So drunk that he can barely stand up, he plops slices of Wonder Bread into each toaster, then lathering them with butter, while Lee looks on with disgust.

Carr’s startling transformation from buttoned down diligence to floundering semi-coherence is weirdly endearing. In one of the play’s funniest scenes, Austin is dictated to by Lee, who wants to change the wording Austin has suggested – “I know the desert like the back of my hand” – in his screenplay. Lee can’t think of the word that describes the overuse of a phrase – “cliché” – and Austin suggests changing it to “I’m intimate with the desert.” Lee’s first reaction is to think of it dim wittingly as having “sex with the desert,” but when Austin reads it back to him from the typewritten page, he heartily approves. It’s a scene that typifies Shepard’s eccentric sense of humor, and enacted with hilarious precision by Stanco and Carr.

The recounting of their father – a looming unseen presence in the play - losing his fake teeth in a doggie bag left on a plate of chop suey is one of those moments when one is torn between being amused or moved. Such is the remarkable, textured complexity that Carr and Stanco imbue their roles with.Separately, it could be argued that Lee and Austin represent, respectively, the Old West and the New West, together the True West. In Hollywood parlance, they are two halves of a creative whole. In the lesser role of Saul, Sylvester plays him with slickly conveyed sangfroid manipulation. Saul wants what’s best for him, while keeping a safe distance from the contentious sibling drama.​Guertin is outlandishly amusing as the absurdist mother who comes back early from her Alaskan vacation – because Picasso was coming to town, even though he’s been dead for years - to find things not quite the same as when she left them. Boys will be boys in this blistering “True West.”